Just updated the Playing with A* algorithm app so that now one can toggle on and off the use of the heuristic and the use of a cross product tiebreaker. This leads to new variants of the algorithm, mainly the well known Dijkstra algorithm.

This A * application was written in Java, so you’ll need to check your java permissions to run it. You can download the .jnlp file and run it from your computer.

The A* Algorithm (A star) is a pathfinding and graph traversal algorithm. It is widely used in computer science, games, robotics and network science. A thorough overview of the algorithm can be found in Introduction to A* which presents several comparisons and illustrations on the mechanics of the A star algorithm.